Thursday, October 2, 2008

COSA: A New Kind of Programming, Part III

In Part II, I showed that behavior control in the COSA programming model is based on a simple master/slave mechanism that uses complementary start/stop control commands. In this post, I reveal how the same method can be used to control high-level components as well.

Component As Effector

Controlling a component simply means that the component can be seen, for all intents and purposes, as a low-level COSA effector. Every component will have a special control/effector cell connected to a multi-connector with three connections: two input connections for the start and stop signals and one output connection for the ‘done’ signal that is emitted when the component is finished with its task. The control effector can be used both internally and externally.

Connectors are great because they enforce plug-compatibility and make drag-and-drop software composition possible, but they don’t do much for program comprehension. The reason is that part of a connector’s purpose is to hide information so as not to overwhelm the user with too much complexity. My philosophy is that information should be delivered on an as-needed basis only. That being said, it would be nice if we could summons a special view of a group of a component in order to see exactly how they interact together.

An Example

Let’s say we have a water level component that is used to control a pump that maintains water in a tank at a certain level. Suppose we don’t want the pump to be turned on too often for maintenance or costs reasons. To do that, we can use a generic real-time timer cell to wait, say, 30 minutes between activations. We could incorporate the timer cell directly into the water level component but the latter would no longer be a generic component. A better alternative is to create a separate supervisor component that uses the timer cell to control the activation of the water level component. The figure below shows the two components, as they would normally appear.In a complex program, the supervisor component would normally be extended to control an indefinite number of slave components. Note that, while the figure shows the components involved, it does not tell us how the water level component is controlled. For that, we need a control view. As seen below, the control view is a simple diagram that depicts the manner in which the water level component is controlled by the supervisor. It displays only the control connections; all other connections, if any, are omitted. Essentially, the water level component emits a signal when it's done. This signal is used to start the delay timer. At the end of the delay, the timer emits a Done signal, which is used to start the water level component and the cycle begins anew.

In Part IV, I will describe the overall control architecture of a COSA component and explain what happens internally to a component when it receives a start or a stop signal.